2. "New features!". Google's products are updated pretty frequently, but sometimes they show this message for months, even if the features are no longer new. Some pathological examples: Google Calendar and Picasa Web Albums.

3. The inconsistent navigation bar. There's no consistency here: some of the links send you to search results, other links send you to homepages. Some of the pages open in a new tab/window, other pages open in the same tab/window. The list of links is different, depending on the current service, and the ordering is not predictable.

4. Search results with tracking code. Because Google needs to track the search results you click on in order to add them to Web History, it replaces their addresses with redirects like: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=... That means you can no longer right click on the link and copy the location. Some workarounds: disable Web History, log out or use this Greasemonkey script.

5. Google Updater. An annoying and intrusive way to install Google software, without providing an alternative for people who like the classic installer.

6. Set Google as my default search and notify me of changes. Every Google software has the mission to make Google your default search option in Internet Explorer (it's already the default option in other browsers), but also to install a notifier that warns you when other software tries to change the default search engine. Usually, the option can be disabled, but Google's wording is vague.

7. Blogger comments. It's hard to create something worse than Blogger's comments: they open in a new page with a different layout, the first option is to log in with a Google account, there's no spam filtering etc.

8. Posting a message at Google Groups. It usually takes one minute for your post to appear on the site, but Google should show it instantly.

9. When you translate a web page, Google Translate shows the original text in a bubble. Google's JavaScript code interferes with other web pages' code and the result is usually terrible. Another downside is that you can't copy the text from a translated web page. One workaround would be to block the JavaScript file, but it keeps changing its address.

10. Google Video has the worst advanced search page. If you search for something and click on "advanced search", your query is lost. The page doesn't put the focus on the first input box and pressing Enter has no effect.

11. Click on a broken link for a Blogger blog and Google is glad to inform you that "the blog you were looking for was not found". Pretty bad for an error message that should've been helpful.

86 comments:

12. Google's official blog posts have titles that make it hard to understand what the post is about. Sometimes, the introductory sentence is also beating around the bush... you'll often have a hard time understanding at a glance what the post is roughly about. While this is perfectly OK on paper (like in a magazine) this is bad style online, in particular for titles (which travel into search results, feed readers and so on in the form of microcontent).

13. Google sometimes doesn't openly communicate their goals. Their communication is not very transparent, e.g. they will not divulge the real reasons why they cancel products (think SOAP API, Google Answers). Also, Google employees talk very little to the outside world likely due to contracts and so on.

14. The Google translator always asks you to tell it from which to which language you want to translate something to. Instead of always forcing users to make a pick in the giant combo box, it would be better if they would try to find something meaningful by default (e.g. if you're using English Google, the target language English would be a good default, and the source language can be found out automatically depending on what you enter; in those cases where it's still ambiguous, they could *still* ask you to make a combo box decision). The Google toolbar already offers something similar where you just hit a button without defining source or target language.

15. Google often only carries a message (we don't do portals, we don't do Chinese censorship, we don't do horoscopes, we use the same AdWords tools as everyone else, we want to send people away as fast as possible etc. etc.) only as long as it benefits them, but then later on forgets that message. Right now, a message you quoted in a previous post was we don't do ads in Google Images, telling people how it benefits users; I'm curious how long they will keep to that message.

16. That Gmail AJAX "still updating dialog".

All in all, I wouldn't say the annoyances balance out the pros. Google is better than that still, IMO. Try using a product like Hotmail; now that's something were there's so many annoyances they cancel out all pros, making the tool have nearly zero usefulness. (Or take a look at the big banner ads which reload constantly in Yahoo Mail.) A tool like e.g. Gmail, even when sometimes slow, is still much more useful than annoying. Also, Google's product all in all still have a very high usability compared to the market average; though with certain Google employees leaving, let's wait and see how long they can keep that up.

My biggest complaint with Google is the inconsistent addresses for all of their products. For example: Google Reader is reader.google.com, type in analytics.google.com it redirects you to www.google.com/analytics, but then go to google history: history.google.com, you get a page not found - when the actual address is www.google.com/history. What about IGoogle? www.igoogle.com works - redirecting you to www.google.com/ig, but i.google.com or ig.google.com lead to page not found. Google Transit? www.google.com/transit - transit.google.com gives page not found. I could go on and on and on about this.. It's so fusterating that google is all about organizing the worlds information - but they still have not mastered the ability to organize their website with a standardized, simple to remember, simple to access web addresses for most of their different components!Google Alerts? www.google.com/alerts - alerts.google.com page not found - Google BlogSearch? http://blogsearch.google.com works perfectly (doesnt even redirect to www.google.com/blogsearch) - but type in www.google.com/blogsearch - that works just as well!!

Cmon google!! Lets be a little more consistent with your website. Its not like you dont know how to do it!

opera is at present still not supported. are they trying to say that they aren't able enough to produce web code that can work with opera? or are they trying to convince us they have not enough money to hire a programmer to fix the compatibility?

I'm still upset that there's not a true address book when you've already began composing a gmail. Instead, you have to save the message, go to the Contacts area, create a group, and then go back to the saved message. And, yes, you would have to do this EVERY TIME if you don't want to forget somebody.

This gets old when you don't send the same things to the same exact people all the time.

Surely, it's not that difficult to incorporate this into Gmail. One would think Google could figure that out.

Originally the design here was to make the products for users of different services more convenient for them to access other services that they would frequently use.

HOWEVER

I just clicked through to see all the different services on the drop down menu, there's two designs for the drop down menu, and it's entirely absent on google scholar. You have one order or design for the websearch products, news, images, blog search, etc. The other order is for services that allow you to interact with your own information on the web, like photos, gmail, calendar, etc.

That design for the product order actually seems well thought out to me. Except for the obvious omission of google scholar.

The thing that probably annoys me the most is that when you're logged in with a Google Account and when you accidentally visit orkut.com (thinking you're logged in with a different account) then Orkut creates automatically a new profile of you (using your Google account information).

Although it shows you the screen where you have to create the profile, the profile itself is already create (and therefor searchable inside Orkut). This creates duplicate names profiles to Orkut for those who have multiple Google Accounts.

I get frustrated with the inability to tell them about simple fixable problems they have without going through potentially unmoderated Google Groups. They've had security certificate issues for their regional sites (google.com.au, google.co.uk etc.) for two weeks now without it being fixed, and I have no idea if they are even aware of the problem, let alone working to fix it. I realise such a big company could have millions of requests/questions a day, but the fact there is no legitimate way to inform them of problems is very frustrating.

And I particularly concur with Philipp's No. 13 - Google just don't tell their users what they plan to do in the next few years. Do I wait around for Google to bring GrandCentral to Australia, or do I find my own solution? Will they ever fix problem X,Y or Z, or should I move to a competitor?

GTalk installer does not prompt the user for an install location, it decides for you! This is behavior normal in evil applications, not Google.If you move the program files to another directory later on it will move itself to the location it wants to with no warning whatsoever.Evil =(

"1. Every time you go to www.google.com/analytics/, Google Analytics asks you to enter your password, even if you are already logged in. One workaround is to bookmark https://www.google.com/analytics/home/."

Isn't that just a little sad?

It's obvious Google do't read this blog (or any other feedback), because the same old crits come up month after month, and all they need is a little common sense.

Getting around a password by using a different URL suggest that either Google thinks security is a bad joke - or they haven't worked out why analytics needs a 'fresh' login (no money at stake) while Adsense doesn't (serious money at stake).

To all of you who did not understand my comment earlier...please visit my blog. It might better explain what I'm talking about when I refer to a "true address book".

Then again, it might just make my point more confusing. Either way, I'm not very good at explaining what I'm talking about. I just know that there's something not quite right with the way it's presently setup.

I have one problem with Google Search when working bilingually. If I search in English through google.co.jp, I am often looking for incidences of the English term as they occur on Japanese language sites.When searching English search terms on Google Japan, English language sites located in Japan seem to get priority. The problem with this is that they are often not the best search results for someone who can read both languages.Yahoo Japan on the otherhand seems to give me the highest overall ranked sites registered with Yahoo Japan regardless of the language of the site itself.I imagine that other people using other languages may have the same kind of searching needs that people working bilingually in Japanese and English (using a Japanese operating system) do.

1. Signature. If you add one, use it, then decide to stop using it, the signature is not saved.

2. Multiple email addresses for a contact: If I have dave_work@dave.com, dave_home@dave.com, and I open a new browser window, login to Gmail, and email dave_work@dave.com, then a short time later decide to email Dave again, when I start typing dave_... in the TO: field, the auto-complete shows two entries for dave_home@dave.com (the email address I DID NOT compose an earlier email to). This seems to only be happening with the newer version of Gmail.

Even worse than the way Blogger handles comments, is the complete lack of a trackback link. To respond to a blog post with any kind of a trackback link, you need to do it with a blogger account. I have a blog, it's not blogger, and it never will be blogger. Now allow me to use a trackback for things I respond to!

@thattalldude:That is incorrect. Blogger chose to use backlinks from blogs instead of trackbacks. It simply performs a search at Google Blog Search for link:POST_URL and displays the results. Obviously, you don't need to have a blog powered by Blogger to link to a post. You probably noticed the "blog this" feature that lets you quote a post in Blogger, but this is just one of the ways you can add your link there.

4I just cannot understand, why can’t they use unobtrusive JS and clean up the links adding onclick handler.Of course there are people, who would Tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-enter a link, but get real, 99% of users click with a mouse.

1). There is no way to change my default address in Google Maps, it still shows my previous address, with no option to change it now that I've moved.

2). They won't remove a previous domain of mine from their index (which points to my name!), so now any searches for me go to a bogus domain that I no longer own (because I took out the dashed spacer). The closest I've gotten to is this URL which only applies to deleting existing domains: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35302

Firsly, I'd like to start by repeating something that I was taught as a kid, "Don't look the gift horse in the mouth", when I receive something for free I generally accept with gratitude, although I suppose the blog post is Google Annoyances so I'll input.

#BillyG - you can change your Default Google Maps address. Just search for an address and it appears as an option. And secondly you stop Google from indexing your site with a simple robot.txt file

In support of the company that I admire and have a lot of time for you have to remember that a large proportion of their products are in Beta or Labs and therefore are being updated and improved, even though sometimes with a long delay, the changes they make I feel are very representative of what the customers want and need. Most recently referring to Google Docs as a good example.

My main annoyance that I'd love to see changed is the inability to contact someone. As an educator and new technologist I daily recommend their suite of products to an array of different people. Sometimes when something goes wrong you really need to be able to talk to someone. The Google Groups can be quite succesful although I love to see a live online contact feature for supporting their products.

@Sam Lyons - as a software developer I think the "beta" excuse is pure BS. Some of their products have been in permanent beta status (I believe Gmail has been in "beta" for something over four years). Which means that word doesn't mean anything any more, and that Google doesn't want to step up to the plate and actually take responsibility for anything. "Gmail's busted? Oh, well, it IS beta, you know". It's a cop out, IMNSHO.

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."- Inago Montoya

Besides the ones I just commented, here's another annoyance I am dealing with today. Google Groups has no way to integrate a Google Calendar or for that matter Google Docs into it. What I really want is one feed aggregator where anything that happens to a related group of items (posts to the group, calendar events, doc updates) gets posted through one RSS feed and/or sent via email. In other words, I want to be able to have email updates from Calendar and Docs "post" to Groups so that those show up in their inbox/reader to anyone subscribing to the group.

Login accounts with the same username have different passwords. I use my email address for my email and for other google products. The result is that I have two accounts with the same username (eg: foo@bar.com). And as it turns out, I have two passwords as well. One that works for Reader, Blogger, Analytics, etc and one that works for gmail, docs, calendar, etc. They need to unify the Google Apps accounts with google logins.

When I click email notification from gtalk, I can read this mail, but can NOT delete this mail. I have to sign in Inbox and then delete it. Damn annoying, especially when i subscribe some forum post notifications.

The reliance on FAQs and Google Groups for customer support. Sometimes, you just need to talk to someone at Google, and you can't find any way to do so. The Google Groups thing, though, makes it feel like Google just doesn't care and would rather have the users figure it out amongst themselves.

When I search inurl:view/view.shtml I get search results for Axis Brand IP Cameras. But Google won't let me go past page 12 in the search results. I get an error message that says my action looks like a virus and until I fix it I won't be allowed to go any further. Why was it ok to see the first 12 pages but not the rest?

I was getting around that using Googlonymous.com. But they seem to be gone now.

1)A major annoyance is this checker for automated bot that keeps coming on as it says your queries look similar, that's the most annoying, just when your in the mood for some serious surfing this message comes up, sometimes it gets so annoying you switch to other search engines.I don't know whether its because we are behind a proxy so all our searches appear from one ip. But it really starts getting on your nerves. Just when your thought flow is in one direction to get boogged down by that "Your Queries look similar"

2) Youtube when you want to add a video to a playlist suddenly you are logged off, even though you are logged in your id, Sometimes even though you just logged you in your id, it shows you are in someone else's channel, and their playlists, not yours.

3) Nowadays gmail when you forward the email the images dont appear, it used to keep the images as such in the forwarded emails, but nowadays the images don't appear they get truncated or left with just their alternate text.

I don't know if anyone has mentioned this, but I block the Google update notifications using AdBlock Plus and AdBlock Plus Element Hider (something like that). Anyway, you can select elements to hide. Sometimes it doesn't work, but I haven't seen an update on GMail for a long time. It kept popping up on Calendar, but eventually went away again. Try it out!

My #1 annoyance is the lack of integration between Google Analytics and AdSense. Why can I see reports such as eCPM by referrer or income by content?

My #2 the lack of integration between Blogger, Feedburner, and Analytics. Why don't Blogger and Feedburner cooperate to show which medium (in other words, RSS) my visitors come from? Instead, most of my visitors are referred from "unset." There is a way to do this with special URLs, and I explained it on the Feedburner forum. You can see sites such as Slashdot do something like this,

Some workarounds: disable/pause Web History, log out or use a Greasemonkey script.

How to disable the web history? I only found how to clear it. I never use it, and you are right: it is annoying.

1. When viewing my Blogger blog, sometimes after the page starts to load I get a full-page error message like "Google error. Please try again in 30 seconds." If it happens to me 3 times in one day, I wonder how often it happens to my visitors. However, I don't know: there is no log. Why is Google not more transparent? Also, this page should have a refresh button. Finally, 30 seconds is longer than many visitors' attention spans.

2. I want to mask a keyword from AdSense. It picks up from my subdomain name, but it has nothing to do with my site and leads to poorly targeted ads. I want to tell AdSense always ignore keyword X.

3. I've given GMail labels a chance for years, but I rather have folders. Otherwise, provide better integration into Thunderbird via IMAP. When I hit delete, I want it to delete. When I move to a local, off-line folder, I want to delete to delete it from GMail. I've read articles on how to set up GMail IMAP, but there is always some catch.

5. Why can't Blogger do a server side include ? I want to include sophisticated, dynamic widgets without cliet-side programming (i.e., JavaScript). It's OK if Blogger itself is limited, so I can just include a X-minute cached copy of a widget from my other site. This point is emphasized by the introduction of Google AppEngine which allows robust, server-side programming.

When editing an old Blogger blog article to update something minor such as change a label or to fix a typo, Blogger republishes the post. Then, people are wondering why the old post is marked as new in their news aggregators. I would prefer this to be an option.

Three minor things that annoy me:- Google Calendar's "You have no events today." messages. I haven't found a way to turn these "empty warnings" off. GMail even started to treat these messages as SPAM :)- Gmail signature's placement. Why place the signature at the end of the message, and not after your own text? When replying to messages the signature is placed after the sender's text.- Being unable do set the format of dates in Gmail, unless through the general language setting.

Two major thing that worries me: - The lack of openness of Google. The invisible wall that exists between this large corporation and the individual user.- Google is becoming a monopoly.

@ sam lyons - IRT your "you can change your Default Google Maps address. Just search for an address and it appears as an option. And secondly you stop Google from indexing your site with a simple robot.txt file", I hate to bust your bubble, but there is a reason I posted my 2 quirks: they are not fixed by your obvious sounding answers.

1.) I already have a default address for where I used to live, and yes, every time I open the map page, it defaults to that location already (even though it still asks me if I want it to be my default location anyway for some reason), but the point is, if I pull up my new home address, it doesn't ask me this same question - therefore, no I cannot change my address

2.) the robot.txt remedy would work if I still owned the domain, but I don't anymore

Multi-account management is a difficult. I have three Apps accounts and one regular account. The all redirect to the same TLD for login, confusing password managers. Give me a single login for all my Google accounts, apps or not.

GMail forces me to put valid E-mail addresses just to save a draft that I'm composing; why does a draft need a valid E-mail address? I don't want to put valid E-mail addresses in drafts to avoid sending them accidentally.

Perhaps the most important one: I can't find any obvious place to report bugs or annoyances for many Google services. You'd think that user feedback would be extremely valuable to Google. Every Google service should have a link somewhere that says "How can we improve this page?" that pops up a simple text box and a submit button, and that submits a report with full context.

Hey everyone, it's safe to assume that Adam and I and a few other people are parsing out these replies and trying to send them to the right people at Google.

In some cases I think that the "annoyance" was a deliberate choice (e.g. to get access to your analytics or web history data requires you to enter your password again, just to be safer), but I definitely agree that there's many things here that could be better.

Thanks for taking the time to post the feedback, and we'll try to get it to the right people at Google.

Lack of integration between Blogger and Picasa. Why can't I pick which album to put to from Blogger? Blogger tells me I have much less disk capacity (100MB?) than Picasa (1GB?), but Blogger uploads to Picasa.

Googles translation program does not read my AJAX include files.... can anyone explain why?? I have 4 files getting called and they are menus. This is what it is suppose to look like... http://www.ranchcardoso.biz/Events/

but when you click on any of the flags, you will see that it will translate everything but the AJAX files.

Reader needs to have threaded notes, so my friends and I can have a discussion about what every story we're sharing. And as another poster mentioned that should be searchable from the same search as my E-Mail.

When you press save preferences in Google's "search preferences" a pop up appears that only has an OK button... It says "your preferences has been saved".Is this information so critical that I have to press the OK button acknowledge I received this information?I highly doubt it.I suggest putting this information as a header on the Google page or put it as some information in the status bar... not as a model mode pop up.

The language setting is also quite dumb in translating every name of every language into the current UI language as it means there's a good chance you won't know what the name of your language is. Even the word for English can be heavily disguised.

Many's the time I've watched people trying to use a public internet terminal in a hotel or airport and being frustrated by not being even able to keep the UI set to English as a lingua-franca.

It's also very US-centric in that if you are using a Google service such as calendaring and you look up a map link, it ignores your location and timezone settings and goes chugging off to locate your event somewhere in the US.

Since when does google care about UI consistency, or screen real-estate? They are the worst. They change around a long-time familiar UI for no F@$#% reason multiple times. Most of their (re)-'inventions' cannot be PERMANENTLY turned off. I've been writing mission-critical software for 20+ years and that's my opinion. Google image search is still only 20 thumbnail results per page max. This is 2009 what century are they living in at that place.

From time to time google search inserts "Ads not by google." Just as Im about to click the search item I wanted, the ads are inserted, delaying my navigation. This was cured for a long time but itz started again. Consequently, Ive switched to Bing. Can you believe it? Microsoft over google. What a deterioration. Why cant they just put it in the preview area--I never used that anyway. Better yet, give me the choice. One of hundreds of annoyances in most of google products that happened recently.

Mail:1. Double scroll bar on the right.2. Too much space used by labels; should be able to toggle labels space on/off.3. Replies hide text enrichment options (text, color, etc).4. Action options (send, etc) not visible except at top of reply and bottom.5. Does not automatically change color of quoted text (or resize it).

Calendar:1. Loads in Chrome, then disappears. (had to reinstall windows to correct)2. Cannot edit and copy to another calendar in one operation.3. Forums loaded with false correctives.